🚀 go-pugleaf

I hate to ruin a great argument with reality, but what the heck...

In article <2019@sdcc6.UUCP> ix408@sdcc6.UUCP (Cris Rys) writes:
>If apple is not going to let people upgrade their ROM who did their
>own memory expansion, then they are really blowing it! (Scientificly
>speaking of course).

Scientifically? Sounds like an opinion to me...

>1. The dealer is only hurting his own business if he won't upgrade
>   someone's ROM. WHy would a dealer turn down money to be made?

It'll be the dealers option, of course. I will point out that the 128K to
512K upgrade was handled simply by shipping a 512K logic board and swapping
it whole. I assume that Apple will handle the ROM upgrade that was as well
because it really reduces the chances of error and infant mortality. The
ROM's, I believe, are soldered in place, and I suspect few service centers
want to be more than boardswappers if they can help it. It is faster, more
reliable, and cheaper that way.

Now, if Apple sends out a new logic board, and the service center opens
your mac and replaces your logic board with their logic board, all of your
custom fixes stay on your old logic board. Since your machine is still
officially a 128K machine, you get a 128K machine back. Now, since your
board is modified, Apple may not accept it back as a core charge from the
service center, so they would eat that cost (I think it was $300 for the 
512K upgrade). Now, who is making money on this deal? 

>2. People will bypass the check and get friend's of standard Mac
>   boards to get a ROM upgrade. Exchange chips in thier own Mac, and
>   then get the ROM upgrade again and so on and so on....

If you don't mind soldering, great! Assuming, of course, the new logic
board doesn't have hardware changed needed for the new ROM, hardware
changes for bug fixes, or other things that might make old logic boards
incompatible with the new ROMs.... I don't know that this is the case, but
I wouldn't ignore the possibility.

>3. Worse comes to worse, the hardware hackers who upgraded their Mac
>   will just copy the new ROM from a friend. Please Apple don't
>   drive us to this!

Illegal, but that's never stopped people before. 

>So it doesn't make too much sense to have a closed door policy.
>Even if Apple does put that rule into effect, it will be easy
>to get around.

I don't think it'll be as easy as you might expect, but I also expect that
the people who are building cheap 512K upgrades will figure out some way of
doing ROM upgrades for their customers. People who do their own will have
to wait for DDJ or someone to help out, likely. If they can.

Please remember in all of this that Apple designed the Mac NOT to be hacked
in hardware. So, this isn't a closed door policy on their part, since you
weren't supposed to be in the building at all. I don't have figures, but I
expect that the number of 'modified' Macs are a rather small minority of
total machines. Most new machines being sold are probably 512K, and I
expect that most of the 128K machines are either upgraded through Apple
(like mine was) or still at 128K. You have to remember that Apple's
Macintosh service is built around the board, not the part, so if anything
goes wrong they shove a new board in the machine and give it back. The old
board goes back to Apple for repair, and eventually ends up in some other
Macintosh. People who modify their boards can't expect Apple to fix their
board -- Apple isn't set up that way, they don't have knowledge of the
changes that have been made, they don't know that the changes aren't
causing the problem, and they don't have time to figure it out.

What this means, of course, is that if you do things to your machine that
you were told not to, like hack the hardware, you are on your own. There
will be third party groups that will support you, I'm sure. For a price, of
course. Any good group will be able to take hardware modifications from
Apple such as ROM's and get them to their customers. Don't expect Apple to
do it for you, because their system simply isn't set up that way, and it
shouldn't be. When you have 250,000 machines out there, you simply can't
survive trying to figure out 10,000 different custom modifications done by
people who might or might not be qualified to hold a soldering iron.

chuq
-- 
:From the closet of anxieties of:                 Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui   nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA

There is nobody as small as those who refuse to accept the success of others.